A ‘Best of’ 2021 Holiday Special: Haiti’s Transition Into Modern Finance

This episode is sponsored by Quantstamp, Nexo.io and KuCoin.

This week and next we’re taking a year-end holiday from new episodes of “Money Reimagined.” Instead, we’re serving up a couple of our favorites from this year.

This week’s pick was Sheila Warren’s: the Haiti episode from May 21.

That’s when Sheila and co-host Michael Casey were joined by Jerry Tardieu, a Haitian author, entrepreneur and politician who represents Petion-ville in the Chamber of Deputies, and by Daniele Jean-Pierre, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Zimbali networks, which delivers smart-ledger solutions for the decentralized economy.

The pair walked us through Haiti’s history to show how a shameful, century-long legacy of a slavery-era debt continues to be a burden for the country. The debt, imposed by France to punish Haiti’s citizens for freeing themselves from their slave masters in a rebellion that won their independence in 1804, later became a U.S.-owned asset serviced by a bank that would become Citibank. In that sense, this long-standing problem is directly related to the issue of Wall Street’s power and dominance in the age of dollar hegemony, a power that is challenged, in theory, by cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

The discussion then turns to what solutions, technological or otherwise, might exist to create a system that empowers people rather than leaves them dependent on charity and foreign aid, with all the strings that come attached to that.

It’s the kind of episode that reminds us why the ideas behind crypto and blockchain matter.

This episode was produced, edited and announced by Michele Musso. Our Holiday theme song is “Father Christmas” by Cody Martin.